In our most recent “Featured Commoner” piece, we catch up with musician Monk Turner, who experiments not only with a variety of musical styles but also distribution techniques, having released a slew of concept albums through the internet archive (all CC licensed). His most recent album, Monk Turner’s Calendar, came out this past week and…

With the help of Hubert Figuiere, Nathan Yergler, Peter Miller, Scott Shawcroft, and Jason Kivlighn, I’m happy to finally announce a new version of liblicense. Summary: Now this is really worth using. For those just joining us now, liblicense is a library to make it easy to add CC metadata support to desktop and server…

Since the beginning we’ve provided our licenses for three separate, distinct audiences: humans, lawyers and machines. The machine audience has been served by metadata versions of the licenses. This metadata is encoded with the HTML you get from the license chooser, as well as for each individual license. For example, you can find the metadata…

Kudos to Pix-Yu for creating an engaging social networking site where users can easily share photo events. Pix-Yu supports Creative Commons licensing and is promoted as an “online virtual space in which users can share life experiences, events, journeys, holidays and meetings etc, by uploading an unlimited number of pictures.” Flickr has been one of…

In continuing our Featured Commoner series, we caught up with Alessandro Simonetto, founder of OnClassical, an audio label for classical music that uses CC licensing integrally in its business plan. What’s OnClassical all about? OnClassical is an online label for refined music. The name means both ON(line)CLASSICAL(music) and ON[about]CLASSICAL[music]. I define “classical” in the same…

A 44 page guide to Building a Rural Wireless Mesh Network: Reliable, affordable and easy access to telecommunication services for all has been identified as key to social and economic development in Africa. Self-provisioning and community ownership of low cost, distributed infrastructure is becoming a viable alternative to increase the penetration of telecommunication services in…

Looking for another way to support CC? Be our friend! By connecting with Creative Commons on sites like Facebook, MySpace, and Flickr, you can help us broaden our reach and educate the masses about the Creative Commons mission. So, starting today, we’re issuing a 50,000 friend challenge to our community. We’re asking you to help…

River Rat Records, an independent record company based in North London, has adopted CC-licenses for all their releases based on the assumption that sharing of music should be allowed without fear of legal ramifications (as long as it stays non-commercial): Music has never been a purely personal experience (more often it’s a shared one), but…

CC evangelist Cory Doctorow has a new column up on Locus Online discussing “the fundamentals of using CC licenses for people who are interested in the idea but haven’t tried it yet”. The article outlines the different conditions available in any given CC-license, how the licenses are read (machine/human/lawyer), and takes note of the harmony…

To the Commoners community, from Cory Doctorow: My writing career and Creative Commons are inextricably bound together. My first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, was published by Tor, the largest science fiction publisher in the world, on January 9, 2003, just a few days after CC launched its first licenses. I was…